This Sunday, 21st March, is the day of the National Census! The census is a count of all people and households in England and Wales. It is held every 10 years and was last held on 27th March 2011.
In 3800BC the Babylonian Empire (who lived in what we now call Iraq) took the first known census. They counted livestock and quantities of butter, honey, milk, wool, and vegetables. The Romans used a census to assess the population and work out how much tax they could raise. The word assess or assessing comes from a Latin word, and in the olden days meant to ‘fix to the amount’. So it’s linked to the origin of the word census!
After learning about the history of the census, we studied our local area and observed the changes in Marylebone between the 2001 and 2011. It was amazing to see the changes, for example the population had increased and so had the number of cars on the roads!
To celebrate the National Census, each class held a ‘Let’s Count Day’. The theme this year was ‘This Matters To us’ so all classes decided something to count that mattered to them! All classes counted different things from number of toys in the Home Corner to opinions about their favourite school dinner! We then discussed what we found out, presented our data and analysed it.
It was great to see every child counting and learning about this National event!
It was very interesting learning about this 🙂
Thank you for your comment Nina! I’m really pleased to hear that you found learning about the census interesting. I learnt lots of new things too!